As the saying goes, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” The implication in that saying is that the one receiving the “free” lunch will be held accountable for a debt of gratitude owed to the provider. It’s a saying worth considering in relation to the dinner hosted by Germany’s Angela Merkel in Berlin, on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, for all leaders of the European Union member nations.

The chancellor’s underlying motive in providing a free dinner for EU leaders is to extract from them, during the mealtime, a consensus on who should be appointed to the two top EU positions created by the Lisbon Treaty/EU constitution—the new EU president and its foreign minister.

Reports indicate that Germany and France, the EU’s two leading nations, have already agreed on who should be appointed to each position. This was apparently decided over an earlier meal enjoyed behind closed doors which Chancellor Merkel shared with Prime Minister Sarkozy of France.

In reference to Monday’s dinner meeting, a recent report observed (Bloomberg, November 6):

“This may be the meeting that breaks the logjam on who becomes president and foreign minister,” Shada Islam, an analyst at the Brussels-based European Policy Center, said in a telephone interview. “The leaders need to move fast to correct the image that the EU moves at a glacial pace.”

It is that generally held view of the EU’s “glacial pace” that, given the facts, has actually masked the behind-the-scenes rapid pace of largely hidden events that will soon catapult the European Union onto center stage in a dramatically sudden move to dominate global politics.

In reality, since the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago, given the sheer complexity of the processes involved, the pace of change in Europe has been nothing short of breathtaking. The problem is we are dealing with institutions that are controlled by an aristocratic European—largely German-Catholic—elite which have untold generations of practice in pulling the strings behind the scenes that craft European events toward a resurrection of the ancient entity that has empowered them throughout European history. Known as the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, its continually rising-falling and-rising-yet-again history has been the consistent theme on the European continent since the Frankish Emperor Charlemagne received its imperial crown on December 25, a.d. 800, at the hands of Pope Leo iii.

All Europe needed 1,100 years ago to stimulate the Vatican and Germany into action to crusade for global empowerment was the right leader. Charlemagne, or Karl the Great as he is known in German history, was such a leader. It should not then be surprising that another Frank of aristocratic Carolingian lineage should be given such a rapturous reception by those influential elites who have been biding their time, waiting in the wings for their moment to energize the EU machinery to full speed to empower that global power to the seventh resurrection of that old “Holy” Roman Empire. German elites have a mind to their history.

The manner in which German Defense Minister zu Guttenberg has suddenly galvanized the German military officer cadre into coalescing in a solid bloc of support behind his new leadership of Germany’s security and defense structure is nothing short of amazing.

It is with this solid backing, unprecedented for any previous minister of defense since Germany’s reunification following the fall of the Berlin Wall, that zu Guttenberg has lit the touch tape of German public opinion to begin swinging it away from its postwar conditioning into an attitude of enduring pacifistic penance, since World War ii, to a mindset that will soon embrace the reality of a newly revived confidence in German military prowess.

The skeptics that laughed Herbert W. Armstrong to scorn when he predicted the rise of a powerful militarized Germany are about to be forced to eat their words. It may not happen within the coming year, or even the next. But it will happen, even as Herbert Armstrong prophesied it would.

Those same skeptics ought to have a mind to history.

It took Hitler and the German elites only six years to build the strongest military force ever witnessed in action in Europe. That was done without space-age technology, without instant telecommunications, without the microchip, without gps, without robotics, and without a whole host of sophisticated technology that has so drastically changed the timing of the process of industry from extraction of raw materials to the rolling of finished goods off the assembly line. But it was done with the ready and willing cooperation of the German people.

The greatest unifier of all in blitzkrieging German public opinion into supporting Hitler’s demented vision of global rule was the imposition of the overarching ideology of Nazism, which pervaded every nook and cranny of German life at the time.

With the latest German-dominated European empire now awaiting its legitimizing on the global political stage with ratification of its constitution pending December 1, together with its launching of one of the largest foreign ministries in the world on Jan. 1, 2010, all that this monolith awaits to assert its authority is the military force to enable it to punch at the level of its newfound political weight.

But to gain the support of public opinion in Germany—the EU’s leading nation—for it to carry out the dream of its military elites for global hegemony, Germany and the European empire it leads need an overarching ideology. It will not be Nazism per se, the ideology which failed in its grab for global power 70 years ago. It will be an ancient ideology that has driven earlier imperial leaders to muster their forces to the crusade for global rule—a universalist religion—the ideology that supplied the spirit that empowered previous resurrections of the “Holy” Roman Empire to pursue their imperialist aims.

To learn of the identity, history, and Bible prophecies directly related to this religious power, and the effect that it will have on the whole world in the very near future, read our book The United States and Britain in Prophecy.